Sunday, 23 June 2013

Hear this: what I heard on the street - and what it says about cycling's merits

It was as inconvenient a time for a work call as I can
imagine. I had grabbed my ringing phone from my pocket just as the lights
turned green at an intersection on the Invisible Visible Boy’s short route to
school. “I can’t talk now,” I shouted before stuffing the phone back into my
pocket, leaning heavily down on my pedal and getting myself, my bike, the boy and
his trailer bike all safely again into forward motion.

But, once I’d said goodbye to the boy and phoned back my
colleague in London,
he didn’t immediately want to talk about the matter in hand. Instead, he made
me realise how thoroughly I’d taken for granted one of my key sources of
information about the world around me as I cycled. I’ve been noticing ever
since how many sounds I hear as I ride around – and how richly they add to my
experience.

I had, I suppose, assumed before my colleague mentioned it
that most of the time while riding I wasn’t hearing very much. For much of my
journeys both to and from work, I work my way past long lines of waiting cars.
No-one’s saying a great deal. Even though it’s New York, people mostly don’t even bother
with honking. They just sit there.

Clinton St, Cobble Hill: very nice for people - and even,
the Invisible Visible Man was surprised to hear,
a hit with gentrifying birds

But, the moment I started thinking about it, I recognised how
much information my hearing was giving me. The wind whistles in my ears, with
anything from a whisper to the full-throated, jet-engine roar of a seriously
stormy day. I hear the gentle whir of my bike’s rear hub. There’s the gentle
clicking as I change onto an easier gear and sometimes a slight clang as the
gear cable loosens and lets the chain slip down to a smaller sprocket. It’s a
good sign if I don’t hear very much. Recently, a tiny bit of water crept into
one of my pedals and I’ve run out of the grease I need to make it completely
quiet again. Every now and again it emits a little squeak, sending my stress
levels a little bit upwards.

Much of the time, as I pedal along steadily, songs play in my
head, to the rhythm of my breathing and pedalling. For a while now, for reasons
I don’t entirely understand, the tune seems to have been Lyle Lovett’s Walk Through the Bottomland – an obscure choice, even to me, but one whose
deliberate beat seems to fit with the way I cycle.

The bike’s interaction with the road makes its own sounds.
Occasionally, I’ll hit some stray stone on the road and send it flying –
thwack! – into a parked car. My mudguard (fender, American readers) gives off a
tiny bit of a vibrating sound – a very miniaturised version of an arrow hitting
a target – every time my front wheel jars into one of the countless
imperfections in the road surface. On the BrooklynBridge,
there’s the steady clack-clack of the wooden boards on the walkway, as the bike
hits each and sets it vibrating against the metal underneath. One night
recently, I went over the QueensboroBridge and enjoyed the sensation of racing down into Queens on a surface made up of jointed concrete slabs –
ka-boom-ka-boom-ka-boom-ka-boom, steadily faster as I picked up speed. It’s
hard to sort out in my head which of these sounds is audible to the wider world
and which is conveyed direct from the road to my skull as the bike judders
against the crack in the road or the joint in the concrete.

The Manhattan Bridge: a perfect urban cacophony

There are sounds of place elsewhere, too. As I leave my
apartment, I hear subway trains growling complainingly around the Culver
Viaduct high above my head. Then, the other morning, in another part of CarrollGardens, I heard what I thought must be
a novelty doorbell or strange alarm. No, I eventually concluded, there were
actually some birds living happily enough in the trees along Clinton Street that they were singing out
to each other one June morning rush hour. In some places, the audio soundtrack
actually provides far more of the atmosphere than what one can see. Riding over
the ManhattanBridge yesterday, I noticed how I could
hear the sound of wash breaking on the shore down below in Dumbo. Then a subway
train rolled out onto the bridge, its clanking echoing off the roadway that
runs above the tracks and drowning out the sounds of the motor traffic. As I
raced the train over the bridge and gathered speed on the ramp down into Chinatown, I ran over one of the loose inspection covers.
“Clunk-clank!” it went as I too sent the sound of my own progress echoing off
the roadway’s underside.

This is how the bike lanes under the FDR Highway look.
But the Invisible Visible Man hears the sound of the cars
banging over the joints in the road above

My sudden noticing of the birdsong, the sounds of the road
and the cacophony on the ManhattanBridge have all made me
feel far more positive about the sounds that surround me as I cycle than I used
to. Then, I noticed mainly the sounds of stress. Like most cyclists, I’m
constantly listening out for the tone of the engines behind me in traffic,
ready to pick out the note of a driver who’s revving his engine, ready to accelerate
dangerously. It’s one of the clearest warning signs one can encounter that a
driver isn’t going to behave safely.

None of that is to suggest, however, that the most
noticeable sounds don't cause me anxiety. The volume of honking gradually
rises each morning as I ride towards the BrooklynBridge
– especially if there’s a garbage truck blocking Clinton Street emitting the strange
low-high-low hum of its hydraulic crushing mechanism. The honking reaches a
pitch as I struggle my way through TriBeCa. On Friday morning, an angry
motorist in a hurry slammed on her brakes when I stopped for a red light where Chambers Street
crosses the West Side Highway. She gave me a long, unmistakeably intimidatory
blast of her horn for having the temerity to stop her from running the light.

Those aren’t the only worry-inducing sounds. Any encounter with a
large, road-hogging SUV has an extra edge when it’s blaring out rap so loud
that the whole car vibrates. The motorists with most faith in honking’s
efficaciousness seem least ready to move aside for emergency vehicles and I
hear their drivers using their sirens to plead their way out of traffic. The
mixture of short blasts, honks and steady whines they emit sounds like nothing
so much as a pitiful trapped dog. Probably no motorist driving along Boerum
Place in downtown Brooklyn the other night was able to hear how desperately the
woman traipsing along the street at 11.30pm with a toddler son and luggage was
swearing as she pleaded for help or criticised or did whatever she was doing to
the person on the other end of her ‘phone call.

But the exposure to the stress is a flipside to the joy of
hearing all this sound. It’s a pleasure of cycling round the city that all my
senses are in immediate, unfiltered contact with the world around me, rather
than being filtered through tinted windows and soundproof doors. I’m
experiencing the city far more fully than I would in a car or a subway train.

That came home to me most fully late last summer, when I had
not long moved to New York. As I stopped for one of the last sets of lights
near my home, an old sedan drew up next to me, its windows rolled down. For a
few seconds, I was treated, wholly unexpectedly, to a blast of sublime 1960s
jazz, saxophones running riot over a pulsing bass line. I looked over at the
driver. We both smiled, surprised to find ourselves sharing a brief
transcendent moment of musical appreciation.

12 comments:

You write so well. I love today's post. Yes, cycling connects us with our environment. With all the sounds that we otherwise would not hear.

More than once I have noticed at my own place of work near the end of business hours that someone would get the latest weather forecast and there would be a discussion about the weather. It was always the people who would be going home by bicycle that were keenly interested in the weather.

You're very kind. I wrote after Superstorm Sandy about the challenges of the weather in this part of the world (http://invisiblevisibleman.blogspot.com/2012/11/whatever-weather-cyclings-proved-post.html). There are certainly more extremes than I encountered when I was in London - and it's well worth not getting caught out in one of the sudden, torrential storms that sweep across pretty much all of the US at this time of year.

The connection with the wider world is, however, a joy. I've just cycled to my office in 90F heat but got occasional little blasts of cold air to cool me down. The people who came by subway missed all that.

I can only imagine that up there by the Pacific Ocean the balance between life-affirming and stressful sounds is tilted very differently from how it was in the DFW area. Am I right? But I should imagine the balance between stress and life-affirming is generally fairly differently balanced.

It's the connection to our outside environment that strikes me in the most palpable way when I am traveling by bicycle on the roads. On roads without sidewalks, often I sense how limited our human presence is on the landscape. It's as if we've restricted people from that very public realm and instead allow only metal, glass, and plastic to exist in the outside world.

On another note, it's amazing how adult the public sphere has become. Our fear of cars has banished children from our roadways, so when I travel with my daughter on the trailer bike, I often feel she is the only recognizable child in the street. This has a rather perverse effect on car drivers, I think. Actions that people would never consider around children, like displays of aggression or swearing are considered acceptable. This most amazingly has been directed at my wife during the morning commute when she is taking our daughter to school on the trailer. Twice she has been sworn at, loud enough for my daughter to hear. I can't imagine that those same people would do that in other social contexts with children around, even if they were frustrated or angry.

It's a very good point, Gneiss. A few weeks ago, I had a driver illegally push past me as I rode towing my son on his trailer bike. When I gave the driver no more than a disapproving look at the next traffic lights, he told me "Get that Death Trap off the Road." Given that he was driving a large SUV aggressively and that I could see when he wound down his window that he was talking on his cellphone, there was more than a hint of irony to his comment.

What an evocative post, Invisible! And so true that when we cycle, we are much more connected and/or exposed to the world around us, be it people, places, sounds or the weather, for better or for worse.

What a fantastic article - Though it made me very sad to think of how badly we have butchered our towns and cities to accomodate these pitiful trapped dogs.

Actually, I think I have become too complacent about the sensory experience of cycling and mostly listen to podcasts on headphones these days. This evening I will commute au naturale (well not quite) inspired by this post!

I suppose I don't mind accommodating the trapped dogs (the emergency vehicles). It's the people trapping them to whom I object.

But I'm glad you're going to ride with your earphones out. I tend to agree with the commenter up above that it's a big aid to safety to be able to hear clearly. Let me know, incidentally, if you substitute for the headphones with a song going round your head. For me, this morning, inspired by the poor weather forecast for later today, it was the Eurythmics' "Here Comes the Rain Again."

Yes Harry Buddar it aint goin be vury safe if peddleng duwn road with thuse earfones in yur lugs is it? Random cars goin vury fast behind you and you is aint haering them coming next its bang and up the hopsital.Laeve the earfones in home is best.

Today I was riding in my area (Northern Virginia) and noticed a weed-eater type sound. At first I was annoyed thinking someone didn't understand the sanctity of quiet on a Sunday summer afternoon. Then I realized the sound was made by cicadas in the grove of trees I was passing. Understanding that it was a "natural" rather than "man-made" sound immediately made me smile. My entire perspective shifted.

And, around here, instead of high-volume rap, it's often something lively in Spanish. I'd be happy for a jazz experience like the one you had.

About Me

I'm a hefty, 6ft 5in Scot. I moved back to London in 2016 after four years of living and cycling in New York City. Despite my size, I have a nearly infallible method of making myself invisible. I put on an eye-catching helmet, pull on a high visibility jacket, reflective wristbands and trouser straps, get on a light blue touring bicycle and head off down the road. I'm suddenly so hard to see that two drivers have knocked me off because, they said, they didn't see me.
This blog is an effort to explain to some of the impatient motorists stuck behind me, puzzled friends and colleagues and - perhaps most of all myself - why being a cyclist has become almost as important a part of my identity as far more important things - my role as a husband, father, Christian and journalist. It seeks to do so by applying the principles of moral philosophy - which I studied for a year at university - and other intellectual disciplines to how I behave on my bike and how everyone uses roads.